Pr Loring Danforth: Macedonians(of the FYROM) are not descendants of the ancient Macedonians; they are Slavs.

An intresting comment took place from Pr. Loring Danforth regarding the ethicity of the Slavmacedonians  at the history-of-macedonia.com
Here is the abstract:

I have always stated, and I repeat here, that modern Macedonians (people who have a Macedonian and not a Greek national identity) are not descendants of the ancient Macedonians; they are Slavs. This means that they speak a Slavic language. Similarly Greeks are Indo-Europeans, since they speak an Indo-European language. This does not mean that Macedonians should be called Slav Macedonians, any more than Russians should be called Slav Russians or Greeks should be called Indo-European Greeks. In my opinion, Macedonian nationalists who deny they are Slavs and claim they are direct descendants of Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians are extremists. They are making inaccurate statements that are bad scholarship and bad politics. Building a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje and naming the Skopje airport after Alexander the Great are in my opinion irresponsible acts that are not in the best interests of the Republic of Macedonia.


I have also consistently stated that people who have a Greek national identity and a Macedonian ethnic or regional identity as Macedonians also have every right to identify themselves as Macedonians. In my opinion no one has the right to monopolize the term “Macedonians” and deny others the right to identify themselves as Macedonians. References to “occupied” portions of Macedonia are also extremely irresponsible and inappropriate. I support the human rights of the Macedonian minority in Greece, as I do the rights of the Greek minority in Turkey, and the Albanian minority in the Republic of Macedonia.

My remark goes to the...regional identity as Pr Danforth quoted. There is not any kind of regional identity. There are two kinds of identity: .......
...National and Cultural.

A Macedonian according to several sources [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Macedonian][http://www.thefreedictionary.com/macedonian] is a native or inhabitant of the (Ancient or Modern) Macedonian region. Any usage diffrent from this that give from the dictionaries has political and ambiguous motives.The use of the Macedonian name as a state (or to name a ethnic group) appellation in no way confers the right to appropriate everything and anything derived from or pertained to the entire region of Macedonia. This needs to be legally clarified and remain binding erga omnes. The state name needs specifically to refer to and describe the present region of FYROM. It should apply erga omnes in multilateral and bilateral international relations and transactions and should be observed by all organizations, states, and other non-governmental international organizations, including the government and the agencies of FYROM. As Kofos said [ELIAMEP, April 2009, The Current Macedonian Issue between Athens and Skopje:Is there an Option for a Breakthrough? ] Greek and FYROM parties should accept the name used by the inhabitants of FYROM for their region of geographical Macedonia, i.e. Vardar Macedonia, or preferably Vardar Makedonija.

It is therefore clear that the appropriation of the name Macedonia by the FYROM, on which they have based all their propaganda and even their national existence, does not even correspond to their own false national identity since their artificially created state does not have any national homogeneity. This appropriation of the Macedonian name goes against every principle of justice and conceals other expediencies which directly insult Greek national and Macedonian Cultural Identities as shows the unchanging nature of their continuous propaganda.

I am a Macedonian , however I am in no way identified with or related to the newly formed independent state referred to as “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” ; I am instead insulted by the fact that I cannot be known as a Macedonian without being identified by others as related to FYROM. This is a rape of my identity and a continuing cultural genocide.

Antony D. Smith remarks [National Identity, Oxford,1991] that there are two main kinds of ethnic extinction in the full sense: genocide and ethnocide, which is sometimes - at times misleadingly — called «cultural genocide». In one sense genocide is a rare and probably modern phenomenon. It includes those cases where we know that mass death of a cultural group was premeditated and the basis of that targeting was exclusively the existence and membership of that cultural group.

My cultural identity has been usurped.